A book with a heartwarming, honorable, and inspirational message for anyone searching for a compassionate perspective.
An exhilarating debut memoir that chronicles a fallen entrepreneur’s eight-year world tour on a tandem bike.
Bianchini’s extraordinary chronicle begins with his often tumultuous childhood and showcases his enduring love of bicycle-riding. He sometimes felt overshadowed by his large extended Northern California family, which fractured when his parents divorced, but his outings on his bike provided the escape he craved. His need for exploration would resurface as an adult after a post-collegiate job slump, numerous failed business ventures, and a breakup that forced him into a period of self-reflection. He and his best buddy, Garryck, came up with an idea to pedal a customized titanium tandem bicycle across the globe, picking up strangers “to help create just a little more peace in our world.” Initially funded by generous sponsors, Bianchini’s Peace Pedalers mission officially embarked on its Stage 1 sequence, which brought the riders from Japan to Australia. Stages 2, 2b, and 3 went from South Africa to Morocco, Italy to Portugal, and Brazil to the United States, respectively, traversing 81 countries altogether. Bianchini and Garryck were able to cover an impressive amount of ground, but this fact pales in comparison to the stories the author shares in this epic travelogue and the kaleidoscopically diverse people they met along the way. A brief ride to a Japanese teahouse gives way to a Fijian Christmas, a sweet-talking session with militant Zimbabwean police officers, descriptions of picturesque Italian Alps scenery and Brazilian Carnival, and an unexpected prospect of fatherhood. Random thefts, flat tires, loneliness, and physical injuries failed to diminish the vigor of the resilient travelers as hundreds of international guest riders (“friendships”) eventually took a seat on their bicycle built for two. Generous pages of scenic photographs personalize the author’s amazing, life-changing journey. However, at more than 400 pages, Bianchini’s slickly produced memoir meanders in places and becomes bloated with exposition; it may have proved cathartic for the author, but it may exasperate readers anxious to cross the finish line.
A book with a heartwarming, honorable, and inspirational message for anyone searching for a compassionate perspective.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0996137201
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ludela Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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